Final report for ONC24-151
Project Information
Over the last decade, REAP has worked with institutional wholesale buyers to identify some of their greatest barriers to local purchasing. Through that work we saw single-source purchasing platforms, where local products could be purchased directly from multiple providers, as a clear solution to existing sourcing issues. We created a local Wholesale Ready Marketplace with funding from a USDA LFPP grant to facilitate purchasing wholesale quantities of local produce and value-add products by local institutional buyers in southern Wisconsin.
The beta version of the Marketplace launched in July 2022, along with a support resource website at wholesaleready.org, and the first 10 producers were onboarding to the Marketplace over the next year. As of Fall 2023, Wholesale Ready Marketplace was set to contribute up to $1,300,000 of locally-produced food to our food system while supporting the growth of diverse, sustainable farms. While we had the beta platform, and some larger farmers interested in using it, we were missing representation from small farms who lack traditional opportunities in wholesale spaces. With this grant, we brought on two cohorts of small-scale producers to onboard to the Wholesale Ready Marketplace and support with wholesale readiness onboarding.
Through feedback from the first cohort, who worked with us from the summer of 2024 through March of 2025, we improved our onboarding process to include resources for farmers who need additional support to be ready for wholesale. These resources include additional technical training and on-farm support in implementing best practices for wholesale production. This need was disproportionately shared by black, Hmoob, and indigenous farmers who are growing specialty crops.
We began the process of onboarding our second cohort in April of 2025, and in July of 2025 the host of the marketplace discontinued the platform without warning. We are fortunate to have two projects in our network that support farmers scaling up to sell wholesale, and are working to connect our second cohort to those programs while also offering those opportunities to our first cohort.
The first of those projects is an app and website platform called Maize, which connects farmers and institutional buyers on a market network platform. Maize started with a direct-to-consumer focus, and has expanded to build an interactive wholesale marketplace while implementing some lessons that REAP learned on our own platform. The farmer-informed open market launched at the end of April 2026, and we hosted a vendor showcase to support that launch in June 2026.
The second of those projects is the FoodShed Partnership, which is an innovative collaboration between nonprofit and for-profit businesses in Madison that is gearing up to act as a food storage and processing hub for area producers. FoodShed is focused on giving wholesale market access to historically underserved farms. We have connected our cohorts with the FoodShed Partnership as they begin to onboard farmers to their storage and processing operations. In working with historically underserved farms, FoodShed is also working with REAP to train and support farmers for upscaling their production and sales. FoodShed is formally opening in August of 2026.
- Support onboarding eight producers onto a wholesale marketplace through technical training and on-farm support to implement best practices in wholesale production.
- Learn from the experiences of producers transitioning to selling their produce in a wholesale market to support other farmers in their transition and improve the wholesale platform.
Cooperators
Research
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Educational & Outreach Activities
Participation summary:
The group of 8 producers that we are working with on this grant have onboarded in two cohorts - the first cohort of four producers was identified summer 2024, and we met with them through March of 2025. In the beginning of April 2025 we began to onboard a second cohort of four producers to the program. The first cohort (an apple farmer, a pork farmer, a veggie farmer, and a tortilla producer) and the second cohort (two veggie farmers, a beef farmer, and a salsa producer) completed the intake form (created under a previous grant), which is attached here - Wholesale Onboarding.
In our first meetings with each of the cohorts we collected information on what they were hoping to sell wholesale and how their operations were running. After those meetings, we sent them to our Wholesale Onboarding Survey and had them set up profiles on our Marketplace. The second follow-up happened on both calls and emails, and we discussed how our resources and program could support their goals and growth.
We created one-pagers on both cohorts to profile them on our Wholesale site as sellers (Wholesale Profiles (1) - one example, the rest are uploaded on our website), as well as for a few other farms in our network that had products on the website. We had also created onboarding guidelines (Profile Best Practices) that are no longer published as they were a guide to our old website.
Access to our marketplace was abruptly removed shortly after onboarding our second cohort. Because of this website change, we were unable to complete two of our educational goals for this project: a whitepaper for the website onboarding process, and case studies about the farmer experiences on the old platform.
Instead, we explored two new partnerships for completing this work: FoodShed Partnership and Maize, who are both described above.
We invited our growers on a tour of the FoodShed facility in November 2025 before it went under construction, and supported an additional FoodShed tour in early February 2026, with information sessions in English, Spanish, and Hmoob for interested farmers. Our producer cohorts were invited to both, with some of the group attending each. Throughout the spring of 2026 we have been planning the opening of the FoodShed, and keeping our farmers connected to the progress while supporting the development of procurement models and educating farmers on the selling opportunities to FoodShed once it's open and running. The FoodShed facility is in the end stages of construction, and will be completed after this grant timeline ends at the end of summer 2026.
We met with Maize shortly after finding out that our site was discontinued to make a plan on how we could work together to keep digital wholesale marketplace access for our producer cohorts. We immediately hosted two learning sessions with Maize in the fall of 2025 to showcase how the site was being built out, and opened the opportunity to both our first cohort and our second cohort to onboard to that site during beta testing to learn the platform. Starting in early 2026 we supported members from both cohorts in onboarding to Maize by collecting and uploading vendor data for them, as well as training them on the site through online and in-person training. The Maize platform was publicly launched at the end of April 2026, and in June 2026 we hosted a vendor showcase to share the platform and our vendors with area buyers. We had 9 total vendors in attendance, with five more represented through posters as they were unable to attend. In total, 5 of our 8 cohort members were represented at this showcase. The showcase was attended by 13 local buyers and additional representatives from ag support organizations. The showcase was small but successful - we were able to identify one significant connection from each vendor that was in attendance, and the average rating of the event by attendees was 4.4/5 with a 4.2/5 rating on attendees likeliness to engage with REAP and Maize wholesale resources moving forward.
As of the end of this grant period there are 1,019 units of 34 products uploaded onto Maize's open market by members of our Wholesale Cohorts, with more products to come as the onboarding continues. These products represent vegetables, herbs, pork, and beef. There are an additional 40 products uploaded to Maize's open market by farmers who attended our vendor showcase but were not a part of the cohorts for this grant.
REAP's relationship with Maize and FoodShed will continue past the scope of this grant work - we will continue to connect our farmers to FoodShed for sales, and we will also be transferring our Wholesale Readiness resources (wholesaleready.org) to Maize, as REAP will have an organizational support profile on the platform so that we can continue our work as hands-on support for farmers as they scale up. This progress was started in May with the Wholesale Ready Score resource that Maize built out based on our Wholesale Onboarding survey.
Learning Outcomes
Connecting with institutional buyers
Preparation to sell wholesale
Improving farm financial tracking
Organizing wholesale inventory
Project Outcomes
Our project created more pathways for area institutions to connect to local farms that grow either regeneratively or organically, and small-scale producers that buy from such farms. Building these connections is an economic benefit to our producers by introducing them to new potential buyers, and utilizing Maize and the FoodShed as emerging anchors of local food procurement in southern Wisconsin ensures that the connections made can be easily maintained and built upon in years to come - which supports a long-term economic benefit, and not just a one-off.
Encouraging institutional purchasers to buy local has lasting environmental impacts as it decreases the carbon footprint of their culinary programs, and supports the farmers in continuing their work as stewards of their land. Additionally, Maize's platform structure as a social market network allows for easy communication and connection between farmers and buyers - something that can be missing in current standard procurement processes.
In the first half of this program, a cohort member of ours that works as a pig farmer in Dane County gave us the feedback that they'd like to be able to list their meat by weight, something that they hadn't easily been able to do on other web sales platforms. While our old Wholesale Marketplace didn't have that ability, Maize does - so when we started onboarding work with Patrick, we shared that piece of feedback with him and he was able to easily build that feature into the platform for bulk meat sales - and it's live now!
One institutional buyer we feel we've had a particularly successful time with during the scope of this grant is UW Health. We introduced them to our wholesale platform early in the process, and knew it would be too small for them as it was but wanted to keep them informed. We invited them to FoodShed tours, and they have attended those and our Vendor Showcase with Maize. They are in talks with both FoodShed and Maize about next steps for purchasing as this grant is coming to a close.
This project helped successfully onboard 7 farms to an emerging online wholesale platform.
Through this project and other projects, REAP has identified a need for online wholesale platforms that are easy to use for both farmers and buyers. Additional work is needed to help pilot these projects and onboard farmers and buyers so that they can be adopted more widely for regular use.